Detecting and fixing corrupt mailboxes

For years, Exchange administrators have used the Information Store Integrity Checker, more commonly known as the ISInteg utility, to detect and repair the mailbox database corruption. You may have used ISInteg in previous versions of Exchange to correct a corruption issue, preventing a user from opening their mailbox, or from opening a particular message. Unfortunately, in order to repair a mailbox with ISInteg, you have to dismount the database hosting the mailbox, taking it offline for everyone else that has a mailbox stored on that database. Obviously, taking an entire mailbox database down for maintenance when it is only affecting one user is less than ideal. In Exchange 2010 SP1, a new cmdlet called New-MailboxRepairRequest was introduced that replaced the ISInteg tool and allows you to detect and repair the mailbox corruption, while the database is online and mounted. In this recipe, we will take a look at how to use these cmdlets and automate...